Talk:Irelia/@comment-75.72.55.220-20120519192256/@comment-4957501-20120520093259
It is a little vague I guess, she's not your typical tanky DPS, and she's doesn't play like a pure Assasssin either, this is why I usually warn propsective new players that she handles differently and has a steeper learning curve than most other solo top's. It takes most people more than a few games before they realize that she's not to be played like a "regular" solo top. As far as I can tell, she's tagged as an Assassin because she has powerful single target damage and is capable of dealing a larger amount of damage in a shorter amount of time than a regular fighter, but contrary to a regular fighter, her damage falls of once HS goes on cooldown, so it's kind of bursty in a way. She also has a CC and a gapcloser. This is why champions like Xin Zhao, Nocturne and Pantheon are tagged as Assassins too. Gapclosers, CC's, a steroid that supplements their attacks and a strong edge in 1vs1 fights against most other champions due to powerful single target damage. She's built like a tanky dps because there's no real place for glass cannon melee DPS in the current meta. This is why Fiora, Yi and Xin are considered bad picks in ranked, their damage becomes laughable later if built tanky. Nocturne's found a good place because he can jungle decently by virtue of his passive and the fact that even though his Q is very narrow and is only used on single targets during ganks, it is still technically aoe and it's easy to hit multiple monsters in camps with it. Irelia settles well into a tanky DPS role because she doesn't have to build damage, unlike other assassins, to be effective since her main source of damage is true, non-scaling and fixed. This allows her to build mostly defence and still be a threat, and this combined with her passive and W's and R's sustain, allow her to fill the role well. The downside of this is that a big portion of her damage is, like I said, non-scaling and fixed, so she slowly and inevitably starts falling off and turning more and more into a soak as the game progresses past the mid game stage. Her ability to stick is actually fairly average among champions with gap closers and CC's, but that all changes the moment you get your hands on a Phage. Her Q applies on-hit effects and resets her AA-timer as well, giving you basically two AA's, combined with even the level 1 slow/stun of her E which allows you to get about 2 more AA's in, this gives you an almost guaranteed Phage proc, which leads to more AA's and since her Q and E have fairly low CD's, getting away from her without a blink or a dash becomes almost impossible. The reason why Trinity Force is so popular on her is because all three parts of it supplement her abilities significantly at a cost effecitve price, something very few other champions can boast and it still only takes up one of her item slots in the end.